‘Busy with conference season!’

It’s been great to get a sense of how our students are doing as we shift from term-time into the summer months but we also wanted to let you know what French at Stirling staff are up to, starting with Nina Parish who is, indeed, very busy with conferences at the moment:

‘It was the Society for French Studies annual conference last week and I chaired an excellent panel on ‘Poetic Revolutions: Remediation, innovation and translation of 20th and 21st French Poetics’ with papers by Emma Wagstaff (Birmingham), James Wishart (KCL) and Jeff Barda (Manchester). The conference was cancelled last year so it was really good to see colleagues again albeit virtually and to listen to some fascinating papers and plenaries (our own Fraser McQueen was also live tweeting the conference).

This week, it’s the Memory Studies Association Conference and I’ll be chairing a panel on the ‘Memories from the Margins’ project  and the Journal of the British Academy special issue (‘Memories from The Margins: Violence, Conflict and Counter-Narratives‘) that I co-edited with Daniele Rugo (Brunel) and which came out last week, with papers by Daniele, Carmen Abou Jaoude (Saint Joseph University of Beirut), Adriana Rudling (Chr. Michelsen Institute, Bergen) and Chris Reynolds (Nottingham Trent University).

I’ll also be chairing a panel on ‘Memory in Music and the Arts’ and speaking with David Clarke (Cardiff) as part of a panel on the Disputed Territories and Memory project about ‘Diaspora Memories and the Virtual Museum: Remembering Lost Homelands.’

And I’ve just finished the second series of Lupin which I found very entertaining indeed!’

Thanks to Nina for this post, good luck with the various papers and chairing duties and there’ll be more updates from students, graduates and staff over the weeks ahead!

Conferences, Launch Events and Scholarships

It’s hard to believe that almost three weeks have already gone past since the last French at Stirling blog post. It’s been another busy period for staff and students alike but, as the dust starts to settle a little, this seems like a good time to catch up with some French at Stirling news.

Often, for some of us, the Summer months would mean attending conferences and giving papers. Although that isn’t happening in the real world at the moment, lots of these events have gone online and Julie Hugonny, in particular, will be flying the French at Stirling flag over the coming months. In fact, Julie just gave a paper at the University of Maynooth’s ‘Femmes dérangées, femmes dérangeantes’ conference earlier this month. Her paper (‘Evelyn Habal: Everyday Magic’) examines the character of Evelyn Habal, an actress and prostitute in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s L’Eve Future, who is reviled for deceiving men with her artificial beauty and her insincere words. But, as Julie explored in her paper, what this scathing description implicitly recognizes, is her ability to create the perfect woman, every day, with makeup and tulle. Julie will also be giving a paper entitled ‘The Last Man on Earth – A New Myth for a new Trauma’ at the Fates and Graces Mythologium conference in Washington DC and another entitled ‘Mary Shelley’s Last Man. The Delusions of Prophecy’ at the Collapse and Extinction: Art, Literature and Discourse Conference at Stockholm University.

And, back in March (so apologies for not having included it closer to the time) Nina Parish gave a paper on ‘’The UNREST project: War Museums, Memory and Interpretation’, about the Horizon 2020-funded project she worked on before coming to Stirling (www.unrest.eu) at the Modern Languages Research Forum at the University of Aberdeen in March.

At the end of last month, Aedín ní Loingsigh was involved in the launch of the Stirling Centre for Interpreting, Translation and Intercultural Studies (SCITIS),directed by Raquel de Pedro Ricoy. The research centre aims to foster national and international cooperation in the fields of Translation Studies, Interpreting Studies and Intercultural Studies, and to address issues that are relevant to increasingly globalised, diverse societies in ways that have an impact on policy and practice. To celebrate the launch, we were delighted to welcome Charles Forsdick (University of Liverpool) to give a short talk followed by a Q&A with audience members. Until recently, Professor Forsdick was AHRC Theme Lead for ‘Translating Cultures’ and oversaw a portfolio of around 120 grants in the fields of translation, interpreting and multilingualism. The exciting launch of SCITIS coincides with a period of unprecedented change in the world. As Professor Forsdick traced how ‘Translating Cultures’ has helped to develop and enrich understandings of global, multilingual transmission and translation in different interconnected contexts, the launch event also gave us an opportunity to explore with him the role and significance of translation and interpreting during the current international health crisis and the move towards a ‘new normal.’ Congratulations and good luck to all our Translation and Interpreting colleagues for the new Centre. You can keep up to date with SCITIS news on Twitter here!

And finally, following on from our RATE nominations last month, more congratulations to Stirling students and staff. Well done to Year 3 English and Film and Media student Oliver whose research project was awarded a Carnegie Vacation Scholarship. Oliver will be working on ‘ 21^st-century Exoticism in Western Cinema’ and Elizabeth Ezra will be supervising the project over the Summer. And congratulations also go to Beth, who is just completing Year 2 of her BA Hons French and Spanish, and who has been awarded a Stevenson Exchange Scholarship to undertake research alongside her British Council Assistantship next year. Beth’s project, which she shaped working with Jean-Michel DesJacques and Cristina Johnston, will look at France’s relationships with its former colonies. She is keen to examine how present-day memory plays into these, the controversies and power imbalances that exist, as well as the ways in which the relationships are represented through museum collections. Thanks to the scholarship Beth plans to travel to Paris, Genoa and Molenbeek in Belgium to gain a holistic understanding of the documentation of immigration from post colonised countries. As she explains: ‘I knew I wanted to find out more about this so I am very grateful to be given this opportunity to build on my current understanding and to have the freedom to travel more than I’d be able to without this grant. I’m excited to study at a university in France too and meet locals my age.’

And last but definitely not least, Elizabeth Ezra’s book Shoe Reels: The History and Philosophy of Footwear in Film, co-edited with Catherine Wheatley, has been nominated for the Kraszna-Krausz Book Award for an ‘outstanding or original contribution to the literature of photography or the moving image’.

More exciting French at Stirling news to follow over the weeks ahead!

Postgraduate studies in a pandemic: from the French Alps to the Hispanic Caribbean

As we mentioned yesterday, we’ve got a lovely backlog of blog posts to work through this week so, following on from the article by our colleague, Julie Hugonny, we’re really pleased to be able to post this update from Martina who graduated in French and Spanish last year:

‘‘What is meant for you will not pass you by’. This is the motivational quote that popped up on my phone as I sit down to write this long overdue article for the French at Stirling blog. Since my last contribution to the blog back in May 2020, a lot has happened, and it is always an honour and a pleasure to be asked for an update. As I had previously mentioned, I applied to the University of Edinburgh’s Master of Science by Research programme in Hispanic studies and successfully received an offer with scholarship in the summer.

Although I really enjoyed studying both French and Spanish during my undergraduate years, I started to feel very drawn to the topic of women in society within the Hispanic Caribbean, which was something I explored in my undergraduate dissertation and continued into my Master’s programme. My choice of topic was, however, partially influenced by my final year French and Spanish modules, particularly the French Atlantic Slave Trade module, taught by Aedín Ni Loingsigh, in which the materials looked at the role of women and motherhood within societies during slavery. As I continue to develop my research now, I have found myself thinking about those same topics within the context of the Hispanic Caribbean.

It has to be said, however, that attempting to complete a Research Masters during a global pandemic has brought its fair share of challenges. The most frustrating aspect has been the lack of access to the library to browse for resources which are not available online! Although it has been possible to request books through a click and collect service, my lovely supervisors and peers who are completing their PhDs all tell me I have truly missed out on this aspect of postgraduate research.

Despite these obstacles, I always feel extremely lucky to be enrolled on the programme and to have (virtually) met a lovely group of students and staff. And it isn’t just all work and no play, as we get together online during the week for Research coffee mornings and a weekly poetry reading session as a way to unwind on a Friday afternoon, complete with snacks and hot beverages. However, the lack of face-to-face interaction has made me truly appreciate all the memories I made during my time at Stirling and I fondly remember my time working as a language assistant in France. Although I have always stayed in touch with my fellow assistants who I also lived with at the time, being able to see where our paths have led us since leaving behind our beloved French Alps back in 2018 has been very rewarding! Our plan to have a reunion is currently on hold, but we are all eagerly waiting for the day we can all safely travel back to Briançon for a holiday!

When I think back to this time last year, at a time when I even doubted I would receive an offer for the research Master’s, I could never have imagined life being as it is now. At times it feels like time goes by slowly with everything shut down and yet here I am, already halfway through my second semester of the course! Not only have I attended virtual conferences hosted by other universities in the UK, but I have also had the wonderful opportunity to participate and discuss my research in an undergraduate seminar! Unfortunately, I have already been informed my graduation ceremony has been cancelled at Edinburgh,

As for what comes next, well… for now I still have one semester left to complete before starting my dissertation which will be due in August, after which I think I will gladly take a break from university life to focus on working while exploring all my options. I remember a few members of staff from both the French and Spanish departments discussing the possibility of applying for a PhD in the future – I have taken the first step with the master’s degree but after starting university at the age of 17 (and now being 23), I think a break is due!’

Many, many thanks to Martina for sending us through this great update and belated congratulations from all of us in French at Stirling on the scholarship success and, more generally, on getting through these first months of postgraduate study in such challenging times. We’ll look forward to hearing what lies ahead!

Mid-Semester Catch-Up Time

Regular blog readers will notice that there’s something of a pattern to when posts go up here, with a flurry of articles and news in the build-up to new semesters and then over the first few weeks but then, as work intensifies for everyone, the pace of posts slows a bit. And then suddenly it’s the mid-semester break and there’s a little bit more time for some updates before teaching starts again, and we realise that there are lots of snippets of news to pass on so here goes.

Teaching in French at Stirling has all been online for the first half of this semester and, as was the case last year, we’ve all been impressed and pleased by how well our students have adapted to the online environment. It’s not easy for any of us and, speaking for everyone in the French at Stirling teaching team, we’re really missing being back in the classroom, chatting to students, bumping into people between classes… However, for the time being, everything remains online and will do until the end of teaching in April, at least, and we’re grateful to our students for their patience and enthusiasm.

As well as adapting to our own Stirling teaching online, for our Semester 6 students, there has been a very particular process of adaptation because, under normal circumstances, most of them would have been away on Study Abroad this semester. However, given the current situation, that wasn’t possible. Instead, our Semester 6 students are benefitting from extra conversation sessions organised by our language team, as well as attending online classes at our partner institutions across France, at the Universities of Lorraine, Aix-Marseille and Tours, as well as at ESSEC Business School and Sciences-Po (Paris, Menton and Dijon).

That’s not to say it’s always straightforward for these students. As Nela, a Semester 6 International Management with European Languages and Society student explains: ‘Studying abroad during the pandemic has been a bit challenging, especially in the beginning. I had trouble figuring out the new platform and the work methodology of the Université de Lorraine. What has been extremely useful, though, was setting up a Facebook messenger group with the rest of the people from Stirling that are going through the same process than me. We can support eachother, chat about our new lecturers, and stay more engaged that way!’ A good bit of intercultural understanding to apply but, as ever, our students are rising to the challenge and finding ways to work through the current circumstances.

What else? Well, earlier in the semester, our colleague, Fiona Barclay, gave a fantastic research paper to our Literature and Languages seminar series entitled ‘Instrumentalising ghosts: the case of the French settlers of Algeria’. Fiona’s paper examined the ways in which the pied-noir community in France represents the present-day embodiment of the colonial legacies which continue to haunt the Mediterranean space between the modern nations of France and Algeria. Our PhD student Fraser McQueen’s excellent article ‘Christophe Guilluy’s France Périphérique and the absence of race from Michel Houellebecq’s Sérotonine’ has just been published in Modern and Contemporary France. Nina Parish just gave a paper with Emma Wagstaff (Birmingham) on ‘Editing Bilingual Poetry Anthologies in 2020’ as part the Extended Conference on ‘Interpreting 21^st-Century Poetry’, organised by La Sapienza University in Rome, the Universitá di Siena, the University of Warwick and the journal Polisemie. And, just before the mid-semester break, Hannah Grayson co-organised a workshop on ‘Languages of Disease in the Contemporary Francophone World’, under the auspices of the IMLR in London, in collaboration with Steven Wilson of Queen’s University Belfast.

And looking ahead to the rest of the semester, what do we have coming up? Nina Parish is organising a translation apéro to mark International Women’s Day on 8^th March, in collaboration with Sandra Daroczi at Bath and involving students from both institutions. Julie Hugonny and our PhD student Lauren Kenny are also organising a series of events that we’ll be hosting over the last three weeks of March around the theme of French Sci-Fi. Events and activities will include a talk on the origins of French sci-fi by Julie, a round-table discussion/Q&A on a French sci-fi film that Elizabeth Ezra will also be part of, and a fun quiz/games session. And Jean-Michel DesJacques and Cristina Johnston have been working with one of our Year 2 French and Spanish students, Beth, who is applying for a Stevenson Exchange Scholarship for next year. On croise les doigts!

More news to come over the weeks ahead (including, I’m delighted to say, updates from students, past and present) but there we go, for starters!

Research News: From Bilingualism to Sciamma

As you’ll have gathered from recent blog posts, these are busy weeks for staff and students in French at Stirling and we wanted to just give you a quick update on a couple of staff research events that have also taken place recently.

First up, a couple of weeks ago, Aedín ní Loingsigh jointly presented a paper with her colleague Ingeborg Birnie at the ‘On the border of art and languages teaching in the multilingual world’ conference. Their work examines ‘Dementia, Bilingualism and the Insights of Performance-Based Research’, with a particularly focus on Gaelic-speakers and a theatre workshop that resulted in a play exploring linguistic relationships in a family where the mother’s dementia results in her returning to Gaelic, having formerly spoken English.

And just this morning, Cristina Johnston gave a lecture (via Zoom) at the University of Passau, talking to the students on their International Culture and Business Studies programme about the films of Céline Sciamma. This was a great opportunity to work with students at one of our long-standing partners and we’re particularly grateful to Christian Dölle at Passau for his invitation.

As ever, keep reading the blog for more updates!

Petit Pays: From Week 1 teaching to conferences

It’s hard to believe that we’re already reaching the end of Week 1 of our new academic year at Stirling and we’ll hopefully get a chance to post some news about what we’ve all been up to over the next little while. For the moment, though, I’m really pleased to be able to post the following article by our colleague, Hannah Grayson, who has been doubly busy this week with Week 1 teaching, on the one hand, and a presentation at a conference, on the other:

‘When I read of one of our students reading Petit Pays by Gaël Faye on his time abroad, I wanted to write a short post to encourage more people to do so! A couple of students who were in touch with me over the summer looking for reading recommendations have already been pointed to this text, but the more readers the merrier.

I spoke about this text this week as part of a virtual research workshop hosted by the University of Warwick and organised by Pierre-Philippe Fraiture. The workshop was titled ‘Central Africa and Belgium: Empire and Postcolonial Resonance‘ and the range of papers interrogated all kinds of connections between the past and present, forms of cultural representation, and ongoing debates about decolonising museums. All kinds of things our French at Stirling students cover in their modules. My paper was titled ‘Récit d’enfance, récit de distance. Gaby as implicated subject in Gaël Faye’s Petit Pays’.

Petit Pays, published in 2016, has received critical acclaim for its lyrical depiction of a childhood universe set alongside the violence of Burundi’s civil war and the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. It tells the childhood story of Gabriel (or Gaby) as he comes of age in Burundi. We are given a picture of his everyday life, and gradually the disruption and destruction of various forms of violence, both at a domestic and broader regional level.

A number of critics who’ve examined Petit Pays have claimed the story is about a ‘paradis perdu’ or lost paradise where the perfect innocence of childhood is interrupted by the violence of war and genocide. I disagree with these readings, and find that instead the text shows a far more complex, ambivalent, and therefore more interesting experience of childhood. The protagonist, Gaby, gets involved in all kinds of scuffles, but what the author really brings to fore is the number of small-scale moral dilemmas he faces.

I spoke about this presentation of a child as an ‘implicated subject’, using a term proposed by Michael Rothberg in his 2019 work The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. With ‘implicated subject’, Rothberg provides an umbrella category for those who participate in injustice, but in indirect ways. My previous research into the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda has focused on the stories of adults who lived through it, so it was fascinating for me to consider this figure of Gaby as a child protagonist who is entangled in all kinds of systems of privilege and power. Anybody interested in reading/talking about this more can get in touch with me.

Beyond all this, it’s a great read. So I wish you bonne lecture!’

Many, many thanks, Hannah, for having found the time to write and send through the blog post, and enjoy the rest of the conference!

Articles, Books and Conferences

As well as launching language websites and giving introductions to films, French at Stirling colleagues and students have been up to all sorts of French-related activities over recent weeks. More on some of these will doubtless follow in due course but, by way of a quick overview…

Anyone with an interest in contemporary French politics and society should look out for Fiona Barclay’s article ‘French citizenship campaigners may find acceptance depends on far more than official papers’ published online in The Conversation in early October. Fiona also gave a talk at the Alliance française in Glasgow on 5^th November about the French settlers of Algeria which included a local pied-noir amongst the attendees.

Fiona and Beatrice’s Ivey’s MOOC ‘Remembering Empire’ is coming to the end of its first run with around 350 people registered at the last count. The MOOC will be left open for new participants to join and will remain live until April so it’s not too late to sign up!

Next week will see a fine Stirling contingent giving papers on a wide range of topics at the annual Society for French Postcolonial Studies conference in London. This year’s conference theme is ‘Postcolonial Realms of Memory in the Francophone World.’ Fiona and Beatrice are both giving papers as part of a panel on ‘Memories of Algeria’, along with Susan Ireland of Grinnell College. Fiona’s paper is on ‘Fraternity in French Algeria: (post-)colonial conceptions of republican citizenry’, while Beatrice will be talking about ‘Ahmed Kalouaz, Childhood and Colonial Memory in Ecriture Jeunesse.’ Fraser McQueen is the third member of the Stirling cohort, with his paper on ‘Memories of Empire in France’s Literary Grands Remplacements.’

Hannah Grayson has two co-edited volumes that have come out over the past few months: Rwanda since 1994: Stories of Change published by Liverpool University Press and After the Genocide in Rwanda: Testimonies of Violence, Change and Reconciliation with IB Tauris. And to return to the online publication The Conversation, our French and Translation colleague, Aedín ní Loingsigh is one of the co-authors of this fantastic article on bilingualism and dementia: ‘Bilingualism and dementia: how some patients lose their second language and rediscover their first.’ Aedín’s co-authors are Ingeborg Birnie (Strathclyde), Thomas Bak (Edinburgh) and our former Stirling colleague, David Murphy (Strathclyde).

More news to follow!

Remembering French Algeria

As well as catching up with graduates of French at Stirling, it’s good to get the opportunity to find out more about what our current colleagues are up to so we’re particularly pleased to be able to post the following article by Beatrice Ivey, who works with us as a post-doctoral researcher:

‘Since September 2018, I have been working with Fiona Barclay on her AHRC-funded project ‘Narratives and Representations of the French Settlers of Algeria’. I have two main roles on the project: first, to research ‘pied-noir’ memory culture, and second, to introduce the project’s research findings to the public.

Research

In my research role, I have presented at two conferences (Digital Diasporas and the Society for the Study of French History) and am in the process of finishing an article on the circulation of colonial-era postcards online among amateur websites dedicated to ‘pied-noir’ memory and history. On the one hand, I have found a great deal of continuity between the postcards’ original purpose (to advertise the empire to the metropole and abroad) and their contemporary purpose as vectors of colonial nostalgia. On the other hand, I have noticed that these postcards also appear in surprising new contexts, fostering nostalgia that does not necessarily apply to the ‘pieds-noirs’ alone.

Public engagement

As part of my public engagement role, Fiona and I have launched a Massive Open Online Course with Iversity entitled ‘Remembering Empire’. This is a free online course which examines narratives of settler colonialism in Algeria through two differing models of memory: one based on competition, the other based on implication. By studying a mixture of archive footage, artefacts, and extracts from literary and journalistic texts, we think this is a pertinent case study for understanding how empire is remembered and forgotten in Europe today.

The course will launch on 17^th October and then again on 21^st November, running for 5 weeks each time with each unit lasting about an hour. The course is open for anyone to register, so do check it out here.’

Many thanks to Beatrice for finding the time to send us through this article and we would encourage all blog readers to sign up for what looks like a fantastic online course! And thanks also to the ‘La Mer à Boire’ society and the Redoute Béar Museum in Port-Vendres for their kind permission to reproduce the postcards.

French at Stirling’s March Events

Just to round up this series of updates to the blog for just now, a quick overview of events French at Stirling staff have been involved in over the course of this past month.

On 18 March, Elizabeth Ezra gave a public talk on ‘Androids and Humans, or How Globalisation Makes Us Human’ as part of a series of talks chaired by Cristina Johnston on the University’s 50^th anniversary Community Open Doors Day. This past week, Cristina was invited to introduce a public screening of Claude Chabrol’s Une Affaire de femmes at the Cameo cinema in Edinburgh, alongside Edinburgh postdoc Hugh Mcdonnell. The screening is part of Mihaela Mihai’s ERC-funded project on Greyzones.

And, winning the battle for the most far-flung location this month, Bill Marshall gave a paper on ‘’Lionel Soukaz: Historicity and Time’ as part of a panel on ‘Cruising the Seventies: Glancing Backwards at Queer Cinema’ at the SCMS conference in Chicago.

Islam in Francophone Culture – PG Study Day

Jamal Bahmad, one of our PhD students, recently organised a Postgraduate Study Day at Stirling, examining the location of Islam in Francophone Cultures from a range of different perspectives. Here’s his report on the day’s events:

SFPS Postgraduate Study Day

“Allah n’est pas obligé: The Location of Islam in Francophone Cultures”

The 2013 postgraduate study day of the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies took place at the University of Stirling on 20 June. The event was co-sponsored by the host institution. Doctoral and postdoctoral researchers from four continents came together to debate the location of Islam in Francophone cultures. The choice of theme was motivated by the insufficient amount of scholarship on Islam in Francophone postcolonial studies. Rigorous scholarship on the location of Islam in the French-speaking world, past and present, is susceptible of yielding novel ways of seeing in Francophone postcolonial cultural studies. The study day was also motivated by the belief that young researchers in the field are best positioned and stand to gain a great deal from paying critical attention to Francophone Islam in an increasingly interconnected world.

Divided into three panels, a publishing workshop and a keynote address, the study day examined the history and current trends in the cultural representations of Islam around the Francophone world. Under the heading ‘Screening Islam’, the first panel addressed the location of this faith system as an everyday practice and political ideology in the production and reception of North African cinema. In her paper, Stefanie Van de Peer (University of St Andrews) explored the politics of laïcité in the often controversial reception of Nadia El Fani’s documentary films. The next speaker, Rym Ouartsi (King’s College London), presented a critical account of the polemical reception of Laila Marrakchi’s Marock (2005) in her native Morocco. The feature film was panned by the Islamists and defended by the secular forces in a polarised public sphere. Finally, Jamal Bahmad (University of Stirling) provided a contrapuntal analysis of Islam in Marock. Through a close reading of the structuring absence of the urban poor in this accented autoethnography of Casablanca’s French-speaking upper class, he unveiled the spectral role of radical Islam in subverting Marrakchi’s project of granting postcolonial agency to her suburban characters.

The second panel looked at Islam in Francophone Europe through two papers by Amina Easat-Daas (Aston University) and Chloé Gill-Khan (University of South Australia). The first speaker examined some methodological questions in her current research project on political participation amongst second-generation Muslim women in France and Francophone Belgium. Gill-Khan’s paper explored how Islam has emerged as a critical paradigm in the literary and cinematic articulations of North African identities in France since the 1980s.

The last panel comprised three papers with a shared focus on Western literary and historical representations of Islam and the Muslim world since the eighteenth century. In the first paper, Mauro Di Lullo (University of Stirling) looked at violence and terror in Jean Genet’s encounter with the Muslim world. The next speaker, Kirsty Bennett (University of Sussex), examined Isabelle Eberhardt’s invention of her Islamic identity in opposition to French colonial power in Algeria. Lastly, Karima Lahrach-Maynard (New York University) delivered a comparative reading of the representations of Islam in France during the crusades of Saint Louis and the Egypt Expedition of Napoleon Bonaparte.

David Murphy (University of Stirling) led a publishing workshop with a focus on the implications of recent developments in academic publishing for young researchers in Francophone postcolonial studies. He offered practical advice to an audience of postgraduate and early-career researchers on how to survive and prosper in a rapidly changing job environment. Getting published enough in the right places at the right time are essential survival skills to find a (stable) job and get established as an academic.

The study day concluded with a keynote address by Phil Dine (National University of Ireland, Galway). It was a very incisive and original survey of the place of Islam in the evolution of colonial and postcolonial discourses and societies in North Africa and metropolitan France. He spoke to key historical periods and seminal colonial and postcolonial texts across a variety of genres and fields. Dr. Dine considered their accumulative contribution to shaping North African subjectivity in its diversity and worldliness from pre-colonial times to the ‘Arab Spring’ protests.

Jamal Bahmad (University of Stirling)